Meanwhile, Annie entertained her niece royally and untiringly. Formal dinners to old family friends must come first, but when spring arrived Leslie was promised house parties and yachting trips more after her own heart. The girl was so excited, so bewildered and tired, even after the first two weeks, that she remained in bed until noon every day, and had a young maid especially detailed to take her dressmaker's fittings for her. But even so she lost weight, her cheeks burned and her eyes glittered feverishly, and her voice took an unnaturally high key, her speech a certain shallow quickness. Acton's undeviating adoration she took with a pretty, spoiled acquiescence, and with old family friends she was charmingly dutiful and deferential, but always with the air of sparing a few glittering drops to their age and dulness from the overflowing cup of her youth and beauty and power. But with her grandmother and aunts she had a new attitude of self-confidence, and to her girl friends she was no longer the old intimate and equal, but a being who had, for the moment at least, left them all behind. She would show them the new silver, the new linens, the engagement-time frocks that were in themselves a trousseau, and wish that Doris or Marion or Virginia were engaged, too; it was such fun! And with older women, the débutantes of six and eight and ten years ago, who had failed of all this glory, who could only listen sweetly to the chatter of plans and honours, and look in uncomplaining admiration at the blazing ring, Leslie was quite merciless. The number of times that she managed to mention her age, the fact that Madame Modiste had tried to give her fittings after three o'clock under the impression that she was a schoolgirl, and the "craziness" of "little me" going over all the late Mrs. Liggett's chests of silver and china, perhaps only these unsuccessful candidates for matrimony could estimate. Certainly Leslie herself was quite unconscious of it, and truly believed what she heard on all sides, that she was "adorable," and "not changed one bit," and "just as unconscious that there was anything else in the world but Acton, as a little girl with her first doll." Christopher and Alice, in the first years of their married life, had built a home at Glen Cove, and Christopher made this his wedding present to his brother. Necessarily, even the handsomest of country homes, if ten years old, needs an almost complete renovation, and this renovation Acton and Leslie, guided by a famous architect, began rapturously to plan, reserving a beautiful apartment not far from Alice in Park Avenue for autumn furnishing and refitting.